


Knight in Shining Armour

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ajan Kloss, Bodyguard, Bodyguard Romance, Childhood Trauma, F/F, Good Friend Rose Tico, Hurt/Comfort, Imperialism, Implied substance abuse, In-Universe Fandom, Interspecies Romance, Jedi Finn (Star Wars), Jedi Purge (Star Wars), Jedi Rey (Star Wars), Kiffar, Kiffar Zorii, Lesbian Rose Tico, Lesbians in Space, Male-Female Friendship, Multi, Original Trilogy as History, Planet Coruscant (Star Wars), Politics, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Prequel Trilogy As History, Psychic Abilities, Psychometry, Rebels as History, Resistance, Senator Rose Tico, Spice, Zorii Bliss & Poe Dameron Friendship, Zorii's Criminal Past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-23 22:21:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30062412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: After the most dramatic assassination attempt since Zam Wessell tried to kill Senator Amidala, Agent Zorii Bliss of Republic Intelligence is assigned to ensure Senator Rose Tico's safety. It's a challenging assignment for several reasons.
Relationships: Finn & Leia Organa, Hera Syndulla & Rose Tico, Jannah & Lando Calrissian, Jannah & Zorii Bliss, Leia Organa & Rey, Paige Tico & Rose Tico, Poe Dameron & Leia Organa, Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey, Rose Tico & Beaumont Kin, Rose Tico & Leia Organa, Zorii Bliss & Beaumont Kin, Zorii Bliss & Poe Dameron, Zorii Bliss/Rose Tico
Comments: 20
Kudos: 33





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am slightly AU'ing here, technically, in the sense that I'm imagining Zorii as Kiffar, like Clone Wars character Quinlan Vos (only her psychometric capabilities are of course different, and much less practised). Think Samira Wiley.
> 
> With thanks to incognitajones for the beta!

Zorii has to admit: she didn’t know a thing about Rose Tico until the day Beaumont Kin put a briefing pack down in front of her and said “You’ll be shadowing Senator Tico starting tomorrow.”

“Who?” said Zorii.

Beaumont produced an eyeroll so harsh it looked like his eyeballs were about to start orbiting Chandrila. “Read the briefing, Bliss. I didn’t write it for my health.”

  
  
“You didn’t write it,” Zorii retorted, picking up the briefing pack anyway. “You made one of your minions do it.”

Maybe it would have been different, if she’d been there on the _Millennium Falcon_ with the last kernel of the Resistance, or even in the hardscrabble days on Ajan Kloss. Zorii’s seen how the survivors of those days gravitate towards each other - the unspoken truths, the stories that are not as funny as their tellers seem to think, and the gaps in their sentences that go unfilled but not unheard. She doesn’t speak that language. She’s kind of glad that - unlike this Senator Tico, or Poe, or the Jedi Rey and Finn - she wasn’t there.

Anyway, Zorii was late to the party. She showed up around Exegol with a bunch of other people rolling the dice one last time, and unlike a lot of the others, she stayed. Poe must have put in a good word, or at least a word of some kind, because no sooner had Zorii woken up with a hangover post-Exegol and homed in on the nearest source of caf than a thin and weary human with scrubby light brown hair and a shirt sized for a healthier man had tapped her on the shoulder. She’d nearly broken his wrist.

“Zorii Bliss,” he’d said. 

“Who wants to know?”

  
“Captain Beaumont Kin,” he’d said. “Intelligence,” and he’d smiled like a rusty razor blade. “We’ve got a use for your skills if you want to use your head as well as your blasters.”

And that had pretty much been that. Zorii hadn’t seen a lot of Resistance leadership after that point, unless Poe sought her out for a couple of beers and a chat about nothing, or unless Jannah and Finn were having one of those hours where they reminisced about their deeply disturbing child soldier adolescence. Zorii ran with Jannah’s crew, doing dirty work and hunting out the First Order’s executioners, because she wasn’t afraid of kids who had once been stormtroopers, and kids who had once been stormtroopers weren’t afraid of her. The kids changed as they scoured out the galaxy - some deaths, some injuries, some finding aptitudes elsewhere; new soldiers cycled in, joining Jannah’s squad, taking Zorii’s orders - but little else ever did. Different planets, different sectors, different orders. Same sort of job. It was more satisfying than buying, selling and killing for spice.

Zorii was good at it, which would make the adjustment to peacetime difficult if Beaumont Kin had any intention of letting her go. There was always someone in the Republican Federation incapable of keeping themselves out of trouble, and Zorii could retrain to survive; she’d watched over some pretty interesting people, most of whom were quite boring in reality. Although she never had to keep an eye on Senator Calrissian, because Jannah inevitably claimed any related responsibilities, she had once provided close protection for Kaydel Ko Connix, who got hammered on the anniversary of Leia Organa’s death and had to be discreetly poured into a taxi, and she’d once acted as honour guard for the legendary Chewbacca. That had been instructive, once she’d tuned her universal translator correctly. The Wookiee had dirt on half the notables from here to the Old Republic, and his stories from back in the day were wild.

Still, nobody ever brought her up to date on Rose Tico, so Zorii is stuck with a briefing pack she’s only had time to read half of, a vague memory of an earnest and very young woman with black hair in those Alderaanian buns half the Ajan Kloss crew wear, and the fixed belief that five a.m. is too early for conference calls. Going by the heated discussion that’s ongoing when Zorii presents herself at Senator Tico’s apartments, Senator Tico disagrees.

It would probably, Zorii thinks, be rude to say “Who are you again?” to the impassioned Quarren currently speechifying in hologram form. Instead Zorii puts the caf pot on, staying well outside the holocamera’s line of vision. She can’t understand what the hell’s going on, but it seems to have something to do with financial services legislation.

Half an hour later, the senator wraps it up, and Zorii salutes her.

"Zorii Bliss, senator. Beaumont Kin assigned me to shadow you."

Senator Tico blinks at her. The senator is smaller than Zorii expected, stocky, with a stubborn chin and deceptively soft dark eyes; she's wearing a closed blue cape heavily embroidered in gold, with a hood that covers her hair. When she stands and pushes it back, Zorii can see her hair is loose and hasn't been brushed, and that she's wearing a pair of soft grey trousers that might be tracksuit bottoms and have definitely seen better days. None of the above will have been visible to the other senators and planetary representatives, so Zorii’s opinion of her good sense rises temporarily until Senator Tico says:

"You're Poe's terrifying friend, aren't you? It was only one measly assassination attempt, and nobody died."

The Ajan Kloss fighters are all fucking unhinged.

Senator Tico has neither eaten nor slept since she arrived on Coruscant to face the most dramatic assassination attempt since the senator from Naboo's lookalike got bumped off in full view of the Chancellor's office, more than fifty years ago. The similarities are striking enough to have the holonet buzzing, especially as Senator Tico, like Senator Amidala, was saved by the assassin's inability to recognise the correct woman. Unlike Senator Amidala, Senator Tico was using a public shuttle for convenience, and out of personal interest she had been inspecting the shuttle's hydraulics, having made friends with the crew. She hadn’t bothered to change on disembarking, so the bounty hunter had simply shot at the best-dressed sentient on board. Luckily, he hadn’t killed her. He'd also been stupid. Hera Syndulla bears no resemblance at all to Rose Tico. She isn't even the correct species.

Senator Tico, who had been hustled out of the way by the crew she befriended and personally dropped off at her (rented, secured) apartment by them, seems much more concerned about the impact on the upcoming talks than she is about her own wellbeing. She goes off to take a shower and dress while Zorii calls out for takeaway breakfast from a place she knows, giving the concierge thirty floors below as a contact and a false name with the order. None of the senator's aides thought to restock the chiller and cabinets, and this is just a temporary rental, so otherwise there's no food. Compared to some senators Tico doesn't dress elaborately, but she's had a long day, night and preceding week and needs a lot of caf to get up to speed, so Zorii has plenty of time to study the rest of the briefing.

Rose Tico is thirty to Zorii’s forty-one, and she's the senator for the Otomok system in the Outer Rim, where she was born. Otomok itself is not powerful - the First Order stripped several of its planets and it has no legacy of wealth or strength of arms - but it's a popular system for Jannah and Finn's former troopers to settle in, and as such has the capabilities to maintain a standing army. It also has a new hyperspace lane, part of the Outer Rim Regeneration Programme, and it's well positioned to take advantage of it, with a canny and well-connected young senator who can ring up any one of a thousand sentients and call in the many favours she accrued during the Second Galactic Civil War. Tico’s very youth, apparent inexperience, and minor home planet initially played to her favour; she's constructed an impressive political coalition in the Outer Rim and she got onto a number of committees that nobody really noticed at the time, until they realised how much of the balance of power she held. Senator Tico is - according to Kin; Zorii hasn't seen very much evidence of this herself - self-effacing, and successfully hid her influence until she lifted a finger six months ago and blocked the expansion of the Miners' Collective into Wild Space. Her chief political allies are all Outer Rim with a few Mid-Rim or non-affiliated systems, and she voted to prosecute a major member of the Banking Clan for fraud. She has no living family, her friends are all well-known political or Resistance figures, and her file lists her as a political protégée of the late General Organa.

On the trip down to pick up the takeaway, Zorii expends some mental energy on trying to figure out who might _not_ want to kill Senator Tico. It appears to be a short list, so when she gets back upstairs and finds the senator in the kitchen, fully dressed, knocking back a can of Chagrian Fuel and a small handful of caffeine pills like they're still mid-war, Zorii asks her for some clarification.

"Who might want to kill me?" Senator Tico echoes, once she's swallowed the pills and grimaced. Zorii, biting back judgement, unpackages breakfast and checks everything before making up a plate for the senator. "Well, the Miners' Collective, maybe? Are you sure they weren’t actually after Hera?"

"I have a seventy-page briefing that says otherwise," Zorii points out.

" _Seventy_ pages? Beaumont never knows when to stop," the senator says, and demolishes a double portion of noona egg, pancet, and vegetable hash. "Thank you for breakfast."

Zorii quickly learns that, whatever else the life of a senator is, it's boring. Senator Tico doesn't make any allowance for nearly being murdered in broad daylight; Zorii shadows her through three meetings, which the senator assures her are completely normal, and a stand-up with her aides, who are all a lot more rattled by the senator's experiences than Tico herself.

They also flinch from Zorii’s helmet, if not her uniform; Zorii doesn't know why, since one is a Kel Dor wearing a respirator and goggles, and another is a Nautolan with their tentacles swaddled in a medical wrap to protect them from poor humidity, but perhaps it's that Zorii’s helmet covers her head and her full face, and the disconcerting lack of sheen or transparency to the faceplate. She sold off the one she wore on Kijimi - too distinctive, too shiny, no use for fighting - and replaced it with one in a similar shape, but duller and tougher. These days she seldom bothers with the pauldrons; few people ever try to attack her, and when she starts a fight, she also finishes it.

People don't really like the faceless effect, especially combined with the full-coverage uniform and the gloves she always wears, which explains the aides' reaction.

Tico tells them off. Zorii appreciates their concern for the senator's welfare, but this will be easier if they're not afraid of her. She calls up the digital briefing on the inside of her faceplate, and notes that all of them have been cleared by Kin, which eliminates one possibility. He also checked up on their information security, which isn't quite as good as their loyalty, and questioned them. Unfortunately, that hasn't turned anything new up. The senator's recent engagements and the ones she's due to perform in the near future are public knowledge, and it wouldn't be hard to guess where she might land, given that her preference for public transport is widely known. There are a few options for shuttle docks in that area, and if Tico used one that isn't her usual it would explain a backup hitter so stupid they shot Syndulla instead. Zorii looked Tico up in the tabloids while going numb with boredom in the earlier meetings, and she's a popular figure, relentlessly sweet and normal, tips generously, always friendly, and often gets photographed in the same places. Zorii can see the issue here, if Tico can't. The woman might just shake hands with her own assassin.

The stand-up meeting takes place while Tico eats what clearly passes for lunch around here (not very much), shared with her aides. One of them bought it on the way to this rented apartment, at a new place they don't usually go to, so that's fine. Tico reminded them to buy enough for Zorii, and checked if she had allergies first. Zorii doesn’t eat in front of them, because that would mean taking her helmet off, but she appreciates the thought.

After lunch, Tico goes to a presentation by the Banking Clan, laying out the terms they want to offer to the Republic on certain loans; she takes meticulous notes, but asks no questions. She stops for several quick chats in the halls of the old Senate building, which is part-museum part-conference centre now, and Zorii trails behind her, half an ear open to the conversation, the remaining one and a half ears and the rest of her senses focused on any potential danger to Tico. Nothing is likely to happen here, since the Old Senate is sufficiently high-security that few would think it worth the time and effort of going after a senator within the building, but Zorii recalls studying an occasion when the bounty hunter Cad Bane did exactly that, and successfully took a group of senators hostage. There’s no point in being lax.

Tico’s popular with her colleagues, she notes. Everyone wants something from her, a favour on a committee, a co-sponsorship on a bill, or just a smile. The Pantoran senator warns Zorii, grinning, that Tico is the hardest-working senator in the building, and Zorii had better be prepared to keep up with her.

“I think I can handle it, sir,” Zorii says, bored.

“Agent Bliss fought from the Battle of Exegol to the Siege of Meen’s Deep,” Tico says, smiling back at the Pantoran, and considerably surprising Zorii, who wasn’t aware Tico had actually read the briefing Kin would have given her. “I think she can keep up with me. Cho, it’s so nice to chat, we must have dinner soon - maybe when the session opens on Corellia? - but I actually have the procedural committee in five minutes, and it’s _kilometres_ away.” 

There follows a wild dash to the other side of the building, via two maintenance corridors and a disused lift shaft. Zorii is not merely surprised but quite shocked. There’s no time to remonstrate with Tico, though, who merely straightens her suit jacket - blacker than the night sky on Ajan Kloss and covered in gleaming sequins - winks at Zorii, and says: “Rey taught me a thing or two and the blueprints are surprisingly easy to get hold of,” before sweeping into the committee room, thirty seconds early.

The senate’s procedural committee is not supposed to be in session, because the senate’s legislative session has not yet begun. It’s slated to begin in six weeks, on Corellia. Coruscant bid for a legislative session, but hasn’t yet won, possibly because nobody has forgotten the twenty-year shitshow of the Imperial Senate or the failure of the Old Republic. Still, it has a certain centre of gravity for citizens of the Core, who don’t quite dominate the senate - but would like to.

Zorii has vague memories of Kaydel Ko Connix pacing her office, walking in and out of range of a holoprojector, and talking at length to Lando Calrissian, legendary former general of the Rebellion and the sneakiest political bastard Zorii’s ever met, about the Core trying to gain absolute control of the Senate. It was set up so that was supposed to be impossible, but even in a few short years’ time, money and influence are telling. And one of the ways influence works is through dull and boring committees like the procedural committee, where everything is buried in dull and boring minutes, and decisions that really matter are hidden away from sight until - oops! - legislation can’t be passed or new representatives can’t be seated. Because it’s technically not legislative, it can sit outside the legislative session. 

Tico’s held a seat on the committee for two years, and according to Kin, it’s the main reason why she’s on Coruscant now. Ryloth also holds a seat, which is currently being occupied by interim senator Hera Syndulla, drafted into the role by her planet while their senator undergoes major surgery. Regrettably, Syndulla is also undergoing treatment, due to getting shot in the galaxy’s most bizarre case of mistaken identity. Zorii’s never seen anything less sincere than the committee lead’s pause to wish Syndulla well, and for a moment she toys with the idea that Tico wasn’t the intended target. Tico is the only other Outer Rim senator here, and if she weren’t present, the procedural committee would be able to force through a number of initiatives even Zorii can see are designed to make it harder to pass legislation without the agreement of a quorum of Core worlds. If she couldn’t see it without being told, the stony expressions on the faces, tendrils, and lekku of assorted observers from Outer Rim territories (who can’t be prevented from sitting in but as non-voting members cannot speak) would make it perfectly clear.

Tico blocks them all with her pleasant smile, using both her vote and her refusal to countenance the committee’s proposed changes without legislative oversight. It takes Zorii a minute to get it, but without Syndulla’s and Tico’s votes in favour, the committee can’t pass their ‘reforms’ without their being placed before the Senate, which has much greater Outer Rim representation. Syndulla’s vote could be waived, since she’s not here, but Tico is, and she’s deflecting all pressure brought to bear on her.

Zorii, with her helmet-enhanced hearing, is wondering whether she should prod the Coruscanti representative in the back and tell him to stop grinding his teeth when the session hits the hour mark and Tico rises, smiling, to say she has another engagement and she looks forward to discussing this further with the honourable members… on Corellia.

“Kin’s field for who wants to kill you just widened,” Zorii observes, in the speeder on the way to the hospital where Hera Syndulla is recuperating. She’s insisted on a temporary ban on public transport, and Tico is instead using the government driver she’s entitled to, comprehensively vetted by Intelligence. Tico doesn’t like it, but she accepts it.

Tico laughs.

Tico visits Syndulla - an elegant Twi’lek in her early seventies who doesn’t seem to have been slowed down all that much by getting shot, and who’s engaged in a spirited argument with the most broken-down old droid Zorii’s ever seen when they arrive - and apologises for getting her shot. Syndulla, whose security is being provided by a vividly dressed Mandalorian woman, comprehensively rubbishes Tico’s apologies and demands a detailed run-down of the session. She gets it, and a promise to see to it that their other meetings are either equally well minuted or pushed back until Syndulla can attend in person.

“I give it twenty-four hours,” says the Mandalorian woman to Zorii. Like Zorii, she’s helmeted; unlike Zorii, she’s toying with a sketchpad.

  
“What?” Zorii says.

  
“Twenty-four hours until she gets Chopper to break her out. Never mind, won’t do her lasting harm.”

Zorii files that away for later consideration.

After the visit to Syndulla, Tico goes back to the flat. It’s got no personality, Zorii notes again. There’s nothing about it that seems to indicate Tico herself. It’s purely corporate, one of the rental apartments paid for by Coruscant’s political body to accommodate senators - cheaper, because Tico’s humanoid with no special requirements. 

Tico reads and annotates draft legislation for a solid six and a half hours, including forty minutes spent absently gobbling leftovers for dinner. Halfway through she takes a call from Jannah Calrissian, captain of the Republic cruiser _Hosnia_ , about the security situation in the Otomok sector and the Perlemian Trade Route, but that only lasts twenty minutes. Zorii times her. 

“Are all your days this busy?” Zorii says, while doing a final perimeter check before Tico goes to bed. It’s well past midnight and the senator’s first appointment is at seven in the morning.

“Oh, no,” Tico says cheerfully. “This one was quite slow. I still find it pretty restful, compared to, you know, Ajan Kloss.”

Zorii thinks about pointing out that, unlike Ajan Kloss, this is self-inflicted. But she doesn’t exactly know Tico well enough for that.

  
  
  


They fall into a routine, once Tico stops insisting on staying up till the small hours. Zorii refuses to sleep before she does, and she recognises that Zorii needs her sleep even as she refuses to recognise that she does. Zorii wakes first, and takes the time to exercise; the apartment complex has a gym and is theoretically secure, given that the floors Tico lives on are only rented out to visiting Republic senators, envoys, and Coruscanti political personnel, but Zorii doesn’t trust that. She has a treadmill moved into Tico’s apartment, and confines herself to whatever she can do in the available space. She’s managed with less. By the time she’s finished, Tico is out of the shower and dressing, or - if it’s not a day when she needs to be dressed to the nines - eating breakfast, which means that Zorii can make use of the bathroom with the power fresher without inconveniencing the senator or inflicting the sight of Zorii in sweaty workout gear on her. 

Zorii is so used to the routine she’s shocked when she tries to open the bathroom door and it turns out to be locked.

“Sorry,” Tico yells. “Not quite finished yet.”

“It’s fine, senator, there’s more than one bathroom.”

  
“But I know you like the fresher in here! Two seconds.” 

Zorii retreats, but too late; the door’s been opened by Senator Tico, wrapped in a fluffy blue towelling dressing gown, her black hair streaming damp down her back. She’s wearing roughly four times as much makeup as usual. Zorii realises she’s staring at the heavy, dramatic liner, the lipstick so pale it makes Zorii think irrationally of blossom on Naboo, the prettiest of the planets she’s ever run a mission on, and the thin silver bars that march vertically down Tico’s forehead to the dark line of her decisive eyebrows and the tip of her delicate nose, at roughly the same time as she realises Tico is staring at her in a sports bra and shorts, dripping with sweat, and not wearing any of her accustomed layers and certainly not _her helmet_.

Zorii never thought she relied on the helmet.

Tico flushes a pretty kind of rose. “I’m so sorry, Zorii, excuse me.”

Zorii has to clear her throat before she can talk. “I’m sorry for interrupting you, senator, there’s no need for you to apologise to me.”  
  
Tico averts her gaze, turning pinker by the second. “I know you prefer people not to see you without the helmet, or your uniform -”

“That - no. It’s not some kind of modesty thing, it’s just -” Zorii falls lamely silent, and then, after a second, settles on: “Armour.”

“Still. I apologise for the intrusion.” Tico steps back, waving an arm into the bathroom. “I’ve finished with the makeup. It’s all yours.”

Before Zorii can say anything, Tico’s turned and flitted out into through the connecting door into the master bedroom, which shuts and abruptly locks behind her. Without her helmet’s enhanced speakers, Zorii’s not precisely sure of the phrase she hears muffled from the other side of the door, but “Force fuck a _sarlacc_ ”, uttered in tones of mortification, seems to be a promising candidate.

Zorii’s still frozen in the doorframe, but if the senator can get over this and move as fast as Jannah - and swear like her, too - then Zorii can manage. She isn’t going to be left behind by these young guns. She steps into the bathroom, closes the door behind her, and turns on the fresher. The whole room is already warm with steam, scented with something light and floral. It’s either Tico’s soap or her perfume, but Zorii doesn’t know which.

She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror and berates herself for looking like she’s been hit in the face with a pan. The last time she was this surprised, Rey had just knocked her on her ass and pointed a lightsaber at her, which remains one of the top ten hottest things Zorii has ever seen. Between the stupid wide eyes with the almost nonexistent iris and the dull red flush on the tops of her cheeks, Zorii looks a fool.

She touches the yellow circle tattoos on her face - two to each cheek; one, smaller, on each side of her nose - and lets her hand fall, staring at herself in the mirror. It’s not as if Tico couldn’t have found out she was Kiffar, Zorii tells herself. It’s not as if she couldn’t have asked Poe about her; Poe knows. It’s not like Zorii wouldn’t have been happy to tell her, or like Tico wouldn’t have found out, whenever Zorii happened to eat in front of her instead of taking something off into a corner while Tico chatted with her aides or worked on a legal draft. It’s not even like it matters, in this brave post-First Order world.

Zorii nearly gets in the shower fully dressed. 

She’s still trying to figure out what to say when she goes into the kitchen and finds Tico isn’t there yet, but the caf pot’s on. Zorii’s made herself a caf, and set one aside for Tico, and is absently reading Kin’s latest update when she hears the rustle of fabric, looks up, and damn nearly drops her caf cup. 

Zorii’s first, stunned impression is that Tico is outlined in silver. After a second she realises that it’s mostly the effect of the headdress she’s wearing, a spiked silver halo that echoes the bars on her face and which Tico carries proudly; she always carries herself upright, Zorii has noticed, never hunches her shoulders or lets her back slouch. She’s wearing no other jewellery except a very simple necklace: a silvery chain, and some kind of battered moon-shaped pendant. Her dress, no more elaborate than most of her fancier senatorial wardrobe but somehow more arresting, is navy blue and silver, embroidered with strong lines and bright motifs that Zorii doesn’t recognise, and it has a black cloak with heavy silver epaulettes that stretches metres behind her. She looks powerful.

Zorii spills caf on the counter, and thanks any god that may or may not be out there that she was reading Kin’s briefing on the back of her faceplate and Tico can’t see her expression. “Special occasion today?” she says, and her voice comes out respectably level.

“It’s Empire Day,” Tico says grimly.

Zorii didn’t spend a whole lot of time paying attention in school, and her parents never supported the Empire: they were bad customers and bad custodians to anyone who wasn’t Human, wealthy, and Core. She’s ignored or forgotten any imperial history she ever learned, but she does remember that the books draw a clear line between the fall of the Republic and the rise of Palpatine. Stupid, if you ask Zorii. He’d been in power for years by the time he made it official. “So there’s… a memorial?”

Tico nods. “There’s a formal memorialising in the old Senate building this morning, and then this evening I’m going to one for the Jedi. It’s in my schedule. At least I hope it’s in my schedule.”

It probably is in the schedule, just not with enough detail for Zorii to have done more than skim-read and trust that Kin’s had his minions vet the events. Zorii’s job is to guard Senator Tico’s person, not to find out who’s trying to kill her. Zorii blinks. “What happened to them?”  
  
Tico grimaces. “The clonetroopers were suborned by the Emperor, who had implanted control chips in their brains, and they killed all the fighting Jedi in the field. Then the Emperor had Darth Vader march on the Temple in Coruscant, which by that stage of the war contained only the elderly, the badly injured, and the children.”

Zorii hisses between her teeth.

“There were ten thousand Jedi at the start of the Clone Wars,” Tico says. “Say two thousand children under their species’ age of maturity, and two thousand elders unable to fight on the front lines. They lost nearly two hundred in the First Battle of Geonosis alone. We don’t actually know how many Jedi escaped the Purge, but probably not more than a few hundred. At the most conservative estimate, five thousand were probably killed in and around the Temple alone, and their numbers have never recovered from that. Even when Master Skywalker’s New Jedi Order was at its height, there weren’t more than three hundred Jedi known to him, and a lot of those were murdered by the Knights of Ren or driven underground.” 

Zorii thinks of Rey, who burns so brightly even someone who doesn’t know what the Force actually is can see it, and who is so bound and bloody determined to mend, to heal, to build. “I never heard of that before.”  
  
“The other thing the Emperor did,” Tico says heavily, “was erase their history, and paint them as nothing but murderous frauds.” She shrugs. Her darkened eyelids are lowered beneath the silver bars. “It’s the first thing you do, if you want to use and abuse a minority. You take away everything that makes them people. He did it to the Wookiees too, or the Lasats, by stripping them of sentient being status. There were Wookiee sacred groves thousands of years old that burned to the ground, and you can never get those back. There’s Lasat poetry we don’t know how to read any more, because the people who spoke that particular ceremonial language are all dead.”

Zorii thinks of Finn, who still doesn’t know where his birth planet was, or who his birth parents were. She thinks of the former stormtroopers, who hold tightly to the new Jedi, who trust in the Force so absolutely because - they say - it is the Force that freed them. Zorii remembers the gleam in Jannah’s eyes, the absolute faith in her voice, the cool ruthlessness with which she took out crime lords auctioning off a Force-sensitive foundling, a frightened Tholothian of no more than five years old. Zorii didn’t have to fire a single shot. 

Kin quite often deals with attempted kidnappings of Force-sensitive children, Zorii recalls. She remembers reading about the prices they fetch in secret markets in Hutt space. The prices were high.

“The First Order did the same thing,” Tico adds, almost like it’s an afterthought. “It’s familiar. At home on Hays Minor - they took children. Entire school classes, sometimes.”

“How did you escape?” Zorii asks, before she can help herself.

“I was small,” Tico says shortly. “And lucky.” Her hand comes up to the necklace, and twists the pendant on its chain.

Zorii passes her the second cup of caf, and they don’t talk about it.

The memorial for the Jedi takes place at sundown; timed, Tico murmurs, for Darth Vader’s march on the Temple, sixty years before. They climb the great steps to what used to be the back side of the Imperial Palace in a silent procession, Rey and Finn holding hands at its head, and stand in the great open hall, which whispers and echoes with their passage. There’s a lament played by a Rylothi harper, and a short speech, and then a moment of silence, a Coruscanti minute for every thousand dead Jedi.

Senator Tico’s face is wax-pale beneath her makeup, which she kept having to touch up over the course of the day. For a second or two, Zorii thinks she’s going to faint, and as a soft low chime announces the end of the silence, her head bows like it’s sunk beneath the weight of her headdress. Zorii’s hand twitches out for just a moment, but then Tico draws a deep breath and her head rises. There are tears glittering on her eyelashes.

“Go in peace,” Rey says, in a voice which rings into the silent hall. She’s not facing the crowd. It’s hard to know whether she’s talking to them, or to someone else - Zorii doesn’t believe in ghosts, she tells herself - but the crowd takes it as a cue to filter away even as Rey walks further into the Temple. Zorii glances round and realises how exposed they’ll be the moment most of this lot are gone; she wants to tell Tico they should leave, but Tico is already moving forward, her cloak swaying in her wake, to catch up with Rey and Finn.

Zorii stops just within earshot, to give them some privacy. Rey and Finn are smiling at Tico, but there’s something in their faces that’s foreign, distant.

  
“You don’t have to do this,” Tico’s saying. “Last year it made you both sick.”

Hera Syndulla is still there, too, and Zorii finds herself close by. For some inexplicable reason, Syndulla’s wearing flight suit orange over a pale beige shirt, and it does not suit her at all. She has also been crying. Zorii’s not going to ask why. 

“Yes, we do,” Finn says, rock-steady and sure. Rey only smiles.

  
“Really?” Tico sounds doubtful. “I know General Organa wouldn’t have wanted this for you.”  
  
“At some point we have to trust our own judgement,” Rey points out. Zorii doesn’t have the foggiest idea what they’re talking about, but Tico looks upset, and Zorii has this faint creeping notion that there’s danger in all this. She eyes a blaster stain sixty years old on the floor not far away; it’s scarred the rock, and blood has been driven deep within it and charred into the ground. Looks like it might have been blue. Mythrol, maybe, or Aqualish. Or perhaps that’s just what time does.

Maybe if she went over and took off her glove and touched the scar, she’d know. Maybe it would be one of those days when objects show her more than she wants to know, leave her with things she can’t forget. Maybe -  
  
“It’s a heavy place, isn’t it,” says Syndulla. “It weighs on you.”  
  
All Zorii can think to do is nod. Tico’s coming back. She doesn’t look seriously distressed any more, just resigned.

“All right, senator?” Zorii says, and she nods. 

Syndulla ends up giving them a lift home, because she’s not medically allowed to climb back down all those steps and Zorii doesn’t want Tico doing it in full view of any hitman with a fancy for a passing pot-shot. Tico’s very silent. 

“It’s strange, isn’t it,” Syndulla says, “how tomorrow, everyone will go back to business as usual.”

Zorii thinks about the security guards and the cooks and the cleaners. Some of us, she thinks, don’t have any choice. But from the look on Syndulla’s face right now as she settles into her seat, Syndulla has no choice but to remember. There’s some kind of reason that there will never again be business as usual, not for her.

Two weeks later the remainder of Tico’s business on Coruscant is concluded and they’re en route for Corellia. It’s a straight flight down the Corellian Run, two days in hyperspace. It used to take much less time, Zorii knows - she hears people on board the _Pearl of Corellia_ complaining about it. Tico pinches her lips together and says nothing about that until they’re in her stateroom, at which point she hurls her soft briefcase across the room.

“What the fuck?” Zorii says. 

Andi, the Kel Dor aide, gasps through her face mask.

  
“I beg your pardon,” Zorii says. “What the fuck, Senator Tico?”

  
“I _know_ Count Hunchuzuc funded Armitage Hux even after the First Order blew Hosnia out of the sky. He doesn’t get to whine that the Exegol fleet ruined his favourite hyperlane,” Tico says, more shortly than Zorii’s ever heard her speak. So there are limits to her sweetness and light after all.

“What a sleemo,” Zorii says. “You want to stay in the antechamber with Andi so I can actually clear this stateroom, or you want to throw something else?”  
  
Somewhat reluctantly, Tico laughs. Andi gives Zorii a shocked look, and steers the senator away. Zorii supposes the kid’s too young to know that Tico saw and heard worse during the Second Galactic Civil War than a bodyguard talking back.

Tico has a single strategy meeting with her aides, a brisk two-hour canter through important news updates, her programme for the next few weeks, and draft legislation. She works them hard, Zorii’s noticed, but not unfairly, and she treats them well. Some of these aides look thin enough to snap, and not in a species-appropriate kind of way, and Zorii’s noticed a few of them jumping with something other than eagerness to get on when a senator calls. Tico sees it too; it's one of the only times the pleasant, professional expression drops from her face. 

Anyway, Andi, Mat and Bia'ly are well paid and well treated and very good at their jobs, and after the strategy meeting Tico releases them to do whatever they like. The _Pearl of Corellia_ has sixteen decks, including multiple pools, a gym, a casino, and a theatre, and even as the aides hustle out Mat the Nautolan is already gloating over the seawater pool tuned to the chemical composition of Corellia’s most sought-after island resort, which they don’t intend to get out of for a full five hours. Pools on Coruscant are expensive, hard to come by, and full of chlorine.

Zorii rolls her eyes a bit, but Tico is smiling affectionately. She leans back in her chair and stretches, then gathers herself up and says: "You too, Agent Bliss. No-one's coming after me here."

Zorii makes a bland noise. There are at least two thousand passengers on this ship, none of whom will have been properly vetted, and if Tico thinks Zorii’s letting her out of her sight, Tico's got another think coming.

"You're very welcome to stay, though, of course!" Tico adds hastily, as if she’s worried she’s being inhospitable. 

"Thank you," Zorii says blandly. Tico immediately trips over the hem of the gauzy dress she wore to an official breakfast with the Pantoran senator, who definitely has his eyes on Tico’s vote for a hyperlane spur he wants funded, and possibly also has his eyes on Tico's love life. He'll be lucky. She's been discreetly linked with a few people since the war ended, but not for a while, and only in gossip magazines. The only relationship recorded in her file is a three-year partnership with Kaydel Ko Connix that came to a mutually agreed end after Tico's election. Probably not a lot of people are willing to stand the pace.

"I need to change," Tico announces. Fair. The dress is pretty, but totally impractical, thin, off-the-shoulder cloud-blue gauze over a white slip. It matches the hooded blue and gold cape she was wearing when Zorii first met her.

"I'll be in my room if you need me, senator," Zorii says. "In case a killer droid jumps out of the vents, or something."

Tico rolls her eyes and scoffs, but she hides a smile too.

Zorii ends up bringing her maintenance kit out into the main sitting room. Her cabin right next to Tico’s is small and poky, clearly intended by the _Pearl of Corellia_ ’s poxy designers for the help not to get too comfortable in. Fortunately Zorii herself isn't very large, and she's used to much closer and less luxurious quarters, but there still isn't enough room to stretch her legs and spread the kit out.

Some of the people Zorii’s protected have been surprised or discomfited by the number of weapons Zorii carries. Tico isn't one of them; when she comes back through into the main room, makeup wiped off, hair pulled back into a pair of buns, and wearing comfortable dungarees and a sweatshirt, she casts an assessing eye at Zorii’s blaster and vibroknife collection and offers to help. Zorii’s weirdly touched, but she declines. Tico has experience with weapons, she didn’t stick to hydraulics during the war, but Zorii knows she hasn't kept up her certifications. It would be embarrassing if Tico shot her own hand off. 

Tico takes the rejection amiably and flops onto the sofa with a datapad full of draft legislation. She finally looks her age, tapping a stylus against her teeth and propping her feet on the arm of the sofa, and she works quietly, with only the occasional grumpy mutter or snort. Zorii can ignore or tune out almost anything, especially with her helmet on, but she finds she doesn't need to. Tico does tend to whistle through her teeth, but after a second that becomes white noise. 

Over the course of an hour, Zorii works her way steadily through the equipment under her hands, cleaning, maintaining, double and triple checking condition and cartridges. A lot of powerful people want Tico dead. Zorii isn't going to be caught out. But she doesn’t even think twice before taking her helmet off and starting to take that apart too: she wears it every day, and it needs the care.

"I can move," Tico says, almost absently. She’s moved on to rapping the stylus against the edge of the data pad in a brisk, quick pattern Zorii recognises as the same clicking rhythm that used to accompany encrypted Resistance communications. Her voice sounds just slightly different outside the confines of the helmet, Zorii notices.

"I told you, senator, it's not a modesty thing."

"It's still your armour." The tapping halts.

Zorii pauses. "Yes," she says, finally. 

"My name is Rose, Agent Bliss."

Zorii huffs. "And mine is Zorii. I don't want to give an unprofessional impression."

"Call me whatever you think is appropriate in public, but in private, I prefer to be called Rose. My aides do the same."

Zorii considers this. It's not an offer she often gets made, but it's fair, and she sees Tico’s point. Rose’s point. "Sure. Rose. So long as you call me Zorii."

Tico - Rose - smiles briefly and sits up straighter; a necklace, half-moon shaped, swings free of the neck of her sweater.

"I thought you took off all your jewellery," Zorii says, without thinking. Maybe she forgot her professionalism on Coruscant.

Rose shakes her head. "I never take it off. It’s half of a pendant I shared with my sister."

Zorii nods. There doesn’t seem to be anything to say; she knows, of course, the story of Paige Tico, her life and her martyred death. She once spent a month shuttling around trouble spots on the Outer Rim on a cruiser called the _Paige Tico_ , and what's more she's talked to Poe. Or rather Poe has talked at her. Paige's fate, like that of all of those who died over D'Qar, haunts his dreams. And Zorii understands making choices that seem essential at the time, and that you later regret.

"I would have thought Poe would have mentioned. I know you're close."

"He didn't say anything about a necklace," Zorii says. She removes the faceplate, cleans it from both sides, and begins checking the seals meticulously. "We knew each other when we were dumb kids, that's all."

Poe made better choices than she did. Poe had better choices available to him. 

"In his spice-running phase?"

Zorii snorts. She’s heard all the jokes. She's made most of them. "If you can call it that. He tried to get a moronic friend of his out of trouble and got in over his head, that's all. He meant well."

"Poe always means well." Rose sighed. "You were trapped by the same gang?"

Zorii weighs up Rose’s likely reaction to the truth of her past, and tells it partially. "Not a lot of good options on Kijimi. It's on the Kessel Run. Empire never policed it, New Republic didn't even try. It's not on the way to anywhere they wanted to go."

"Sounds like Hays." Rose has moved on to chewing the end of her stylus. "Just a different kind of mines."

Zorii lets out a surprised little snort. "Maybe. We had the First Order up our asses as soon as they got a hand on the spice trade, of course."

" _Just_ like Hays," Rose murmurs, and Zorii laughs. It's short. Out of practice.

"No way out, I'm guessing," Rose continues, marking up her file. "Weren’t a lot of ways off Hays either. Paige and I sabotaged a few too many First Order shuttles and our parents sold just about everything to get us on a ship as stowaways. We'd both have been dead before twenty if they hadn't. The continent we grew up on was blasted to ash."

"Sorry about that," Zorii says. Kijimi doesn't exist any more, but Zorii has never been attached to it. Maybe if her parents had died with it, she'd feel something more. 

"Don’t be. I ran for senator to do something about it."

"A lot of things."

Rose laughs. "And one day it might be enough." (Zorii’s beginning to understand her work ethic.) "Was the helmet to protect you from the spice runners?"

Zorii hesitates again, and then shakes her head. She's told a lot of partial truths about her helmet over the years; one more will do no harm, so long as it's not actually a lie. Zorii respects Rose; it would be a shame to have to tell her an outright lie. Besides, she needs Rose’s trust to get enough buy-in to keep her safe. 

"Ignore me," Rose says tactfully. "I don't mean to pry, but that doesn't excuse nosing into your personal business."

Well. Good manners never hurt. Zorii bows her head over the helmet and focuses on swapping out the padding so she can clean it. "You know I'm Kiffar, senator?"

"It's in your file." Rose doesn’t question the change in address. She has sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees; it's kind of cute, from a high-flying political operative with a war record longer than she is tall. "The tattoos are also very distinctive."

"My dad's idea. He was big into keeping in touch with his culture." Now that she's older and has a bit more distance, Zorii can sympathise. Kind of. "Never saw Kiffex, he was born on Kijimi, but it was important to him. Some Kiffar are psychometric. You can charge a lot for using that, if it doesn't get used against you. I found people were using it against me. I don’t have it strongly or reliably, so they didn't get shit, but all it would have taken is a bit of bad luck."

Zorii shrugs. Rose presses her lips together and nods.

Zorii used to wear gloves because Kiffar physiology reacts to smaller doses of spice than the average human, and only a fool gets high on their own product. It didn't take long for her to realise that the assumption was she wore gloves to protect herself from being blindsided by visions, or that others saw the potential to disable her or toy with her. Zorii’s never fancied being a doll of any kind and she's refused testing for her psychometry at every physical she's ever had since she acquired an employer that mandated them. The doctors still ask, of course, but they’ve learned. These days, they move on before Zorii can even answer.

Zorii already knows what she needs to know: she can't eliminate it, predict it, or make use of it. No strong impression she's ever had has been truly useful. No meaningful vision has ever been clear. All she's left with is the memory of clutching the doorplate of her childhood home trying to figure out where her father went, and getting nothing but his last goodbye footsteps; sorting her mother's belongings to sell with bare hands, and getting nothing at all. Having the things Poe left her crushed and burned in the city incinerator without even touching them, a blaster and a good jacket and even a credit chip, because she hated him so much for getting to leave. He's never asked and she's never said anything, but she thinks he knows. 

Zorii doesn’t explain any of this, but Rose is watching her carefully, dark eyes heavy and serious, and she has her hand wrapped around her pendant. Zorii thinks she can guess at the depth of the silences.

"Makeup smears, tattooing over them would have been conspicuous, masks fall off or don't hold in a fight… I tried a few things. The helmet was the most practical." She hands Rose helmet and faceplate, and Rose sets aside her datapad to examine them. She handles them as carefully as Zorii could wish, eyes narrow and assessing; she lets out a surprised little laugh as she registers the HUD display on the back of the plate.

"So this is why your high score went up between this morning and boarding. I wish I could play Squares in my breakfast meetings." Rose glances up at Zorii. "You are shootfirst, aren't you?"

Poe's Squares league, which has been running on a spare bit of Resistance server for the last ten years, has been a source of nothing but drama in Zorii’s life, but the game is the perfect mindless entertainment for days when all she has to do is stand still and look stern. "Maybe." If Rose herself isn't wrenchjockey11, Zorii will eat her spare helmet padding.

Rose grins, handing back the helmet and the faceplate. "I'm going to blame Beaumont for teaching you never to give a straight answer."

"I had twenty years as a criminal to learn how to do that." 

"Like the Pantoran senator," Rose says, grin turning evil.

"Don’t even think about comparing me to that slimeball, Tico, I've got standards."

Rose laughs outright. They fall into a comfortable silence while Zorii fits the pieces of her helmet back together, checks the magnetic seals, and tests the fit.

"Sorry about your sister," Zorii says, after a minute, going back to her work.

"Sorry about your planet," Rose says, absorbed in her legislation again. 

And for a minute, here on this ship traversing a hyperlane that will never be all the way rebuilt from their last war, Zorii feels like they might be equals. Which is ridiculous, of course. All Zorii’s here for is to keep Rose alive.


	2. Chapter 2

They land on Corellia and Zorii does not let her guard down, which is just as well, because when they get into Rose’s new flat - and this place has actually been planned as hers and decorated for entertaining, so Zorii sees holos of familiar faces and colours and patterns that look like the ones Rose favours in her clothes - Zorii has just fucking cleared the place when a formerly inactivated droid suddenly whirs to life and tries to stab Rose with, of all things, a concealed vibroblade. Rose dives behind a sofa. Zorii fries the fucking thing and hustles Rose out to a secure location, and it takes another six hours before Intelligence have gone over the flat top to bottom and they’re allowed back in.

“I should have just flown home to Hays,” Rose says disconsolately, flopping face down onto the enormous bed. “Or gone to stay with Rey and Finn. They offered, you know.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I’m on a trade tariffs committee that’s going to start session before the legislative session even though they can’t propose any legislation until it does start, and if I’m not here from the jump they’ll get the agenda baked in and it’ll be too late to do anything,” Rose says, turning onto her back. She didn’t get a scratch on her from the droid, but she does have a bruise from where she hit the coffee table on the way down. Zorii’s eyes linger on it.

“Politicians are shits,” Zorii observes.

Rose laughs hysterically, and then sighs. “I didn’t think they’d follow me here.”

Zorii bites back her sympathy. “Tough shit for them,” she says instead. “I followed you here, too.”

Rose smiles.

Zorii is not caught by surprise by Leia Organa’s memorial, since they’re flying to Yavin IV for that, and since Poe has already booked Rose a cabin on his flagship, which means they’ll be using the dedicated military lane and travelling at twice the usual speed. Zorii gets the feeling that this is not merely because Poe likes Rose, but that it’s a political favour designed to ensure Rose misses as little of the action on Corellia as possible. She also anticipates some kind of Ajan Kloss reunion. She isn’t caught by surprise by Rose dressing up, either, not after the shattering experience of Empire Day, although it is a contrast from the rough coveralls Rose wore for most of the journey. You can take a mechanic out of the hydraulics bay, but you can’t get the hydraulics out of the mechanic. Zorii spent most of the journey trailing her around Poe’s ship while delighted engineers explained every cubic centimetre of their collective baby to Rose.

The day of, Zorii wears dress uniform, and doesn’t even begrudge going to the extra trouble to pack it. She never actually met Leia Organa in person, knew her only by the negative space the Resistance mourned around, but her life was legendary, and she moulded and taught half of the people Zorii knows. She held the line for freedom, and Zorii will respect that, even if she was a latecomer to Organa’s cause. Rose, of course, looks stunning, but she’s not wearing the same blue gown or headdress as before, which Zorii had kind of hoped to see again. She painted the bars on her face again, and she’s put her hair up in some kind of way that curls it in on itself around a silver band, so it’s caught up in the band at the back and the silver peeks through at the front. She’s wearing her half-moon necklace and a pair of gleaming white crystal earrings that cradle the shells of her delicate ears. Her dress is almost blindingly white, with a broad winged neckline made in layers of some thin filmy fabric material, Zorii doesn’t know the name. If Zorii wore it she’d probably get blood or mud or grease on it nearly instantly.

Zorii’s getting too used to catching her breath behind her faceplate. She’s starting to wonder if she should call Kin, tell him to get someone else on the case, because there’s no way her judgement is not affected.

“You look very smart!” Rose says, as genuine as ever.

“You look beautiful,” Zorii says, and catches her breath in her throat. “I mean, that’s a beautiful dress.”

“Thank you,” Rose says, flushing pink. She turns on her heel, and the layers of the skirt spin out. “General Organa always wore white for memorials. Reset, and things like that.”

Zorii never celebrates Reset either, except with the Resistance, who had to grieve somehow and who were devoted to a good party. But she knows the outlines: the memory of the day when the tide turned for the Rebellion, both the loss of Alderaan and the gain of Luke Skywalker, who blew the Death Star from the sky and killed the Emperor. At least in the stories. At least in theory.

Zorii still doesn’t believe that stupid recording was really the Emperor. The only person who might know the truth is Rey, but she doesn’t talk about it. At least not to people like Zorii.

Anyway, she follows along to the memorial, which is very touching and regrettably full of a number of people who are only there for the political look of it, and that Leia Organa would cheerfully have spat on. Poe cries buckets. Rose assures Zorii that he always does this, which is why he never gives a speech, not after the first year, when he got three-quarters of the way through and had to be relieved by Finn.

“She was important to you,” Zorii says afterwards, lurking at Rose’s shoulder and watching the gathering like a hawk. She’s been jumpy since Rose was nearly stabbed on Corellia, proving that it wasn’t a local grudge from some fucker on Coruscant. Rose, oblivious, is trying to eat without getting crumbs on her dress.

“Yes,” Rose says. “She was an inspiration. An incredible leader, cowed by nothing. She gave us hope.” She mulls this over for a second, and says: “You never met her, did you? What brought you to the Resistance?”

Zorii’s silent for so long that Rose ends up forced to have a whole conversation with the head of the Miners' Collective when he accosts her. It’s the only time Zorii has ever seen her look insincere when she smiles, and probably someone who hasn’t spent several months in close proximity with her wouldn’t notice. Eventually the New Alderaanian senator descends on him, and the two of them have a discussion sufficiently heated that Zorii takes the opportunity to steer Rose away while neither of them is paying attention.

“I guess it was one last throw of the dice,” Zorii says, eventually. It's not the answer she usually gives. It's not a partial truth, either.

“The Resistance?” Rose says, audibly surprised.

Zorii nods.

There’s a pause. It’s stiflingly hot and Zorii’s sweating like a pig in the tight collar of her uniform.

“I don’t believe in causes,” Zorii says. “I’m not like you, senator." She has to bite back the use of Rose’s actual name. "But I guess I thought it was worth a try.”

Rose lays her hand over Zorii’s, and makes sure she only touches gloved skin. “That’s a kind of hope too, you know.”

Yavin IV reminds Zorii very much of Ajan Kloss, except that Ajan Kloss must have been what Yavin IV was, thirty years ago, when a young Leia Organa landed carrying the plans to the Death Star. Yavin IV is bigger now, populated. It has cities and towns. It has Poe’s hometown, where Mr Dameron - elderly, but hale - greets Rose with an enthusiastic hug, and allows Zorii to lurk in the background with a beer, playing Squares on the back of her faceplate when the conversation gets too personal for Zorii to take an interest. Poe clearly hasn’t mentioned Zorii’s vexed relationship to his teenaged escapade on Kijimi, because Mr Dameron doesn’t bring it up, or look at her strangely. They spend a very pleasant two days sightseeing - Rose manages to combine it with some political networking, because of course she does; this time it’s climbing the steps to one of the great old temples with the Chandrilan senator, who awards the Mon Mothma scholarship to a student off Yavin IV every year.

“Who the hell is Mon Mothma,” Zorii says to the Chandrilan senator’s bodyguard, who is not keeping up all that well. This is a mistake, because the bodyguard takes instant offence and starts to tell her at great length. Zorii nearly misses Rose subtly showing off her knowledge of the new Jedi, clearly a personal fascination of the senator’s although they don’t exactly seem to embody the life of service to the galaxy and dedication to others that Rey and Finn champion, and delicately extracting several concessions that Finn needs to protect the new Order from political control.

“Nice view, senator,” Zorii says to Rose, when the Chandrilans have retreated into the shade. Rose is piling more suncream onto her cheekbones, and standing too close to the crumbling edge of the temple. “Look, don’t touch.”

Rose gives her that sudden, surprised look and smile again, and retreats onto more solid ground.

That evening they say goodbye to Mr Dameron, and take a ship-to-ground tender up to Poe’s flagship. Poe seems to be settled in for a night of reminiscing with Finn, Rey, and his father; Rose sighs as they drive away, twisting her head to look back at the waving group. Poe has an arm around Rey’s waist, and he’s leaning on Finn. Zorii doesn’t need to look to know Mr Dameron’s smiling at them. He always does.

“I miss Paige,” Rose says suddenly.

Her martyred sister. Zorii looks across at her.

“I don’t have any other family.”

Zorii does look back this time. “Yes, you do.”

Rose waves a hand, and chokes and smiles. “Not like that.”

Zorii would have said Rose was too busy to be lonely; Zorii can be wrong. She presses her foot against Rose’s in the back of the speeder.

“She would have liked you,” Rose says.

Zorii takes leave to doubt that, but instead of going to the mess aboard the _Leia Organa_ to find someone to play sabacc with or drink with - as she would be perfectly within her rights to do; this entire ship is sworn to defend Senator Rose Tico and her colleagues to the death, and Zorii is technically off duty - she orders dinner to Rose’s cabin, and cues up an episode of _Echo_. It’s a popular, largely fictionalised drama set in the three years the Rebellion spent on Hoth. Technically no historical figures are involved, except in the background; Leia Organa gives the occasional speech, Luke Skywalker bolts through the back of some scenes, and Chewbacca features in a few storylines. Not many, and only as a guest appearance, because Chewbacca’s still alive and - according to Rose - perfectly willing to tear as many arms off as he needs to. Jannah got Zorii onto it, and Rose claims to dislike it, but she has strong opinions about whether Kyrie (a handsome medic and secret Jedi) should make out with Limia (a card-sharping bomber pilot) or not, and she has even stronger opinions about the mechanics of the setting on Echo Base. Apparently none of it’s even remotely plausible, and bombers don’t work like that.

Rose enjoys herself disposing of a particularly stupid but climactic plot point in the last season - she doesn’t believe Luke Skywalker ever fought a nest of wampas - and eats all of her dinner, as opposed to whatever she remembers to get into her mouth while doing something else. She falls asleep at the beginning of the last episode, and Zorii figures she’s done her duty. But she possibly doesn't sleep all that well, because the next morning wrenchmonkey11 has overtaken yellowsaber's high score on Squares, and Rey can actually predict the squares before they arrive on the screen.

Rose is pretty quiet the whole time they fly back to Corellia, reading in preparation for the upcoming session. It gives Zorii loads of uninterrupted time in the gym, and loads of time to think, both about what she’s seen, and about the things she knows Rose is reading. It gives her time to figure out what Rose is really working on. The last credit drops, and the jigsaw piece falls into place, when she overhears Rose composing a long message to the Law Speaker of the Tatooine Free System, which has absolutely fuck all to do with the Republic and prefers it that way. It’s very carefully phrased, but Zorii has learned to listen to Rose’s careful phrasing.

“You’re building a power base, aren’t you,” she says, without quite meaning to do it. “All of this stuff. The committees, the laws, the networking. It’s meant for power in the Republic, but it’s also meant to build an alliance outside the Republic. So that if the Republic goes tits-up again, the Rim won’t be vulnerable.”

Rose freezes. And then she tilts her head to one side and smiles.

“I believe in the Republic,” she says.

“Yes,” Zorii says. The sentence is a leading question, without being phrased as one, and so is Zorii’s answer.

“General Organa taught me,” Rose says, “to have faith in the essential worth of the democracy I participate in, and to hold it to account. And also to have a _very_ good back-up plan.”

Zorii thinks about all the friends Rose has, and all the plans she has, and all the things she has to protect. And then Zorii asks herself if it would be deserting, under the circumstances, and - then again - whether Zorii fucking Bliss gives a single flying shit about a court-martial. The answer to both is no.

She isn't on the Republic’s side because she trusts them, or believes in their vision. She was never a fan of the First Order - they were bad for business and they screwed her profit margins - but she doesn’t think justice ever comes from the top down, and growing up on Kijimi taught her not to believe in authority either. If it hadn't, then watching the Senate wheel and deal and threaten to let power calcify in the hands of people who already have it would have done the job. She’s on the Republic’s side because a charismatic flyboy dropped into her life and asked her how much she hated the First Order, and because she looked at a ragtag Jedi, a deserting stormtrooper, and that flyboy and asked herself: _how much have I got to lose, really?_ Everything since then has just been a function of following those people. Every dumb decision, every near-death experience.

Zorii has made a lot of choices because there was no better option, but this doesn't feel like that. Not even a bit.

“Count me in,” Zorii says. “Just let me keep you alive until Kin can find out who’s trying to kill you, that’s all I ask.”

It’s at a dinner to celebrate the moving of the Senate to Corellia for the official fifth legislative session of the New Republic that the worst happens. Rose sits down to dinner with a drink in her hand, laughing to the Mythrol representative seated next to her, and takes a gulp. She’s been in her element; Zorii, watching from the sidelines with all the other bodyguards, has watched the currents of people swirling round her. She’s been talking so much she’s hardly even had a sip of the drink she was handed when she came in. Everyone wants a piece of what she’s got, with the exception of the security threats, and in this context, those are just good gossip, which in itself is great leverage. Rose is a sweetheart - Zorii’s heart thumps uncomfortably, double-time - but she’s a canny politician, too.

Zorii can only see Rose’s face in part profile, but she tenses as Rose suddenly frowns, then takes some water and a little of her appetiser, and then has another drink of whatever cocktail that is. And then she begins to cough uncontrollably, and looks wildly round for Zorii.

From the display on the inside of her helmet, Zorii calls for an immediate medical alert even as she’s crossing the floor to reach Rose. Rose has stood up and flailed backwards, knocking the chair over, and cries and murmurs are following her as she moves. The Mythrol has just burst some kind of panicked dust into the air and Rose is staggering, stumbling. One leg gives away beneath her and she trips on the hem of her floor-length pale blue dress. Zorii catches her as she turns and falls, stares down into Rose’s face.

“Medic _now_!” she shouts aloud, since the response to her alert isn’t coming fast enough. Scanning the area and Rose herself she sees no injury and no shooter, so this is poison. Zorii’s heart is racing, and Rose is gripping her shoulder tightly, trying to get something out even as her face is rapidly turning an alarming shade of green. Rose is still looking up into Zorii’s eyes; somehow she never misses. She always looks straight into Zorii’s eyes. Zorii can do nothing for poison, she carries no antidotes. She’s going to watch Rose die looking into her eyes.

Something as blinding as the sunrise cannons into them and knocks Zorii aside, and Zorii realises belatedly that it’s Rey, her eyes gone almost silver-white with a kind of power no-one else can dream of.

“It’s okay, Rose,” Rey is saying, in a smooth, calm tone at violent odds with the way she’s suddenly too bright to look at. “It’s okay, I’m here, I’m going to help you, it’s going to be all right.” She lays her hand on Rose’s chest, over the root of her oesophagus. Zorii can already see the green ebbing away from Rose’s face, and while relief sinks cold and shaking into her bones, it leaves behind something else.

Fury, Zorii recognises belatedly. Rage. This is the second time Rose has nearly been killed on her watch: the third murder attempt in three months, the second foiled by chance. She was useless to prevent it and she’s useless to save Rose now. Rose would be dying right now if Rey weren’t here; Zorii can hear medics running towards them, but they are late, and Rose is currently holding onto life through the grace of the Force and nothing else. There is nothing Zorii can do.

Well, she thinks, seizing her rage by the throat and shaking it. Almost nothing.

Zorii rips her glove off and stamps back to the table. It’s already mostly cleared of sentients, partly because those who are neither hurt nor helping Rose have been moved away by their own bodyguards, out of the line of fire. Zorii kicks the Mythrol representative’s fallen chair aside, drops her glove, and grabs the glass that Rose was using.

_Show me_ , she thinks, bending all her will on it, even as she knows that it’s useless - she can’t ask her psychometry for a fucking thing, or it would have drained away at her command long before - and even as she knows there’s every chance that it was Rose’s meal that was poisoned, not her drink. All the staff here are vetted, she thinks as her hand clasps the stem, it must be a senator, an aide -

Her vision whites out, and _hate_ , she feels, _anger_ , she feels, _how dare this backwater hick stand in our way_ , and _easily dealt with_ , and a glimpse, just a fleeting glimpse, of a middle-aged man dressed like a prosperous businessman, and a vial, slipping from the sleeve of his shirt so that the contents empty into Rose’s glass, in the blink of an eye, right under Zorii’s nose. It’s only a glimpse. A glimpse is enough.

Zorii’s vision clears, and she’s staring right at him. Behind her faceplate, she smiles, and she knows it’s a nasty smile. Maybe he knows from the way her stance changes or her hand moves to a weapon, maybe he’s just a fool, but whatever it is, he is foolish enough to try to cut and run. But Zorii is faster. It’s lucky her blaster is already set to stun. The bolt catches him between the shoulders, and he falls face down, to the accompaniment of screams.

Unfortunately, it turns out that when you are not a licensed practitioner, psychometry is not admissible in a court of law. Fortunately, Jannah locks down the building and has it searched immediately, which produces the necessary evidence. The vial Zorii describes is found in a decorative pot plant, and it retains not only residue of the poison used on Rose, but fingerprints from the head of the Miners' Collective’s chief aide, currently recuperating in a different hospital to Rose, under police guard. By the time Rose has come round, the Miners' Collective has already put down fifty thousand credits of cash bail on the chief aide and filed a lawsuit against Republic Intelligence, and Kin has spent a full hour shouting at Zorii like that’s going to change anything she did then or will do in the future.

“Did you get him?” Rose asks.

“I got the one who did it,” Zorii says grimly. “Not the one who ordered it.”

“Oh,” Rose says, and falls silent. “The Miners' Collective, was it?”

Zorii nods.

Rose rolls her eyes, and shifts uncomfortably. She looks small in the hospital bed. Zorii forgot she was small. “What now?”

“I don’t know. The Republic doesn’t pay me to think.” _It pays me to keep people safe, and I failed you._

Rose snorts, but weakly. “Stay with me?” she asks.

Zorii left her glove back at the convention centre. She lays her bare hand over Rose’s, and watches Rose’s eyes dilate with surprise even as Rose wraps her fingers around Zorii’s.

“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” Zorii says, and watches while Rose falls asleep.

Her psychometry is quiet now. There’s nothing in her grasp but the soft skin of Rose’s hand, the ridges and bumps of old calluses, the shiny scars of old burns. Zorii runs her thumb over Rose’s knuckles, and holds on.

Rose is up and about within a couple of days, and fully recovered within two weeks. Her allies in the Senate take over parts of her work, and her aides take dictation or produce briefing notes for her so that she doesn’t overstrain herself, as she’s clearly desperate to do. Confined to her apartment, with no physical respite other than occasional walks around the complex’s open-air garden that make Zorii twitch with nerves and visits to its pool that alarm her for other reasons, Rose frets. On enforced rest, she tears through a series of trashy novels clearly heavily based on Rey and Finn’s grand romance - the bits where a thinly-veiled construct of Poe expires of jealousy are funny enough for Zorii to record Rose’s dramatic readings and send them to Poe - and one more thoughtful one which tells the story of a young stormtrooper questioning their place in the galaxy. The author clearly has a dreadful crush on Jannah Calrissian. They also get through the last series of _Echo_ , all twenty episodes of it; the Battle of Hoth alone is stretched over five episodes. (Kyrie and Limia kiss, but the last season ends on an ominous note that reminds the viewers _not all the makers of history get to see the final product_. Zorii thinks this is ridiculous - surely at this point they’re all intimately familiar with the cost of civil war, children of one conflict and warriors of a second - but she supposes not everyone navigates around the galaxy by graves they ought to visit.)

They also play a lot of Squares. Zorii watches Rose’s high scores carefully. It's the best way to know if she can sleep through the nights.

Zorii gets regular updates from Kin. The lawsuit has been dropped, since a judge received proof to xir satisfaction that the aide had poisoned Rose, and had turned to flee on realising he was a suspect; Zorii’s stun bolt to the back is, in this context, acceptably minimal force, since she couldn’t have known that a further attack on the senator wasn’t planned. The Miners' Collective tries, for about five minutes, to put forward an appeal on the basis that the aide wasn’t a flight risk and should have been arrested conscious, but since he’s fucked off back to Muun - which has no extradition treaty with the New Republic - the judge throws that out without more than a snort, and a snort from a Duros is a very expressive snort. Given the planet the aide sought refuge on, which is not his home planet, Kin’s looking into links to the Banking Clan, which still has their headquarters there. Last time Zorii sat in on a meeting about it someone suggested that Senator Tico has an amazing gift for revealing Clone Wars-era grudges, someone else suggested that her legislative record indicated a much more relevant interest in revoking corporate personhood, and the whole thing descended into chaos and recrimination. Zorii muted herself and turned the projector off ten minutes in.

But speculation aside - there isn’t enough to arrest everyone. Zorii could try to make Rose stay safely indoors until there’s enough evidence to bring down whoever’s ordering the attempts, but it wouldn’t work, and Zorii doesn’t have the heart to try. Rose is so desperate to get back to work. To what she considers her calling. Listening to the calls she does take from friends and allies, Zorii can’t deny that they need her sincerity, her persuasiveness, her amazing memory for tiny minutiae that topple krayt dragons.

Rose’s return to the Senate is triumphant, and it makes Zorii nervous. Against Zorii’s advice, Rose confirmed her attendance in person at a significant debate, and the story immediately got out. The place is swarming with holocameras. Zorii’s glad that she requested reinforcements from Kin; they’re able to circle Rose and keep her moving swiftly through the crowd of reporters and droids. Zorii throws a few elbows, and pushes away a microphone that gets shoved past her shoulder into Rose’s face; one of the other escorts fries a media drone that swoops down over Rose’s head. Rose ducks as it falls, and Zorii kicks it aside.

When they get indoors and the Senate guard slam the postern door of Corellia’s Debate Rooms behind them, even Rose looks a little bit overwhelmed.

“You okay?” Zorii says roughly.

“That was a lot!” Rose says brightly, slightly ashen around the eyes. She’s regained the colour in her face - and blessedly none of it is green - but Zorii can see how strained she is.

“You good to go in?” Zorii asks.

Rose hesitates. “If we could maybe stop in my office for a glass of water.”

Not everyone gets assigned an office in the buildings where the Senate holds session; there are far too many representatives for that. Rose was given one in deference to the recent assassination attempt, both on security grounds - the less time she spends out in the open, the happier Zorii will be - and because the assumption is that she’s in relatively poor health. Intelligence have done nothing to discourage this, hoping that her would-be assassins will lay off for a time, just in case the poisoning works slowly. 

Zorii nods, and leads the way. The office has been swept for bugs and traps, she knows; last night and again early this morning. She still insists on taking the lead, and checking the office thoroughly before Rose comes in.

“You’re so careful,” Rose says affectionately.

“It’s my job,” Zorii says. She has thick gloves on today, fastened inside her sleeves - the fact that Senator Tico’s unnamed bodyguard used psychometry to identify the last attempted assassin is, if not publicly confirmed, widespread gossip, and it makes her uncomfortable - but suddenly she wishes she had real psychometry, like she could touch an object, any object, and know all about it, instead of occasionally having startling experiences in communal showers. Something’s bothering her. Something’s not right. There’s this faint scritching noise, and it could just be feedback in her helmet, which occasionally doesn’t play nicely with other people’s security systems, or it could just be tinnitus from all those years of blowing shit up. Zorii can’t be sure.

But something’s not right.

Rose lays her briefcase down on the desk, and the scritching turns to a metallic noise turns to -

Zorii throws herself across Rose as a spider-shaped assassin droid bursts from the air vent, the size of Zorii’s own head and probably a lot deadlier; eight vicious, spear-tipped feet burst from its gleaming black body as it falls to the ground, immediately regains its upside, and charges, blaster firing. Zorii shoves Rose behind her and out of the door, where she’s immediately hustled away, yelling and swearing. Zorii takes a blaster wound to the shoulder and falls backwards with a grunt, but she’s clearly not its primary programmed target as it doesn’t bother to kill her as it advances. Blasters don’t touch it, rattling off its armour and leaving scorched holes in the walls; it leaps forward to follow Rose, spiked feet digging deep into Zorii’s leg and torso and drawing blood, a gut-punch of pain that makes Zorii gasp like it’s her last breath. But it’s not her last breath, and she can still hear Rose screaming, and since the droid a few weeks ago, Zorii’s started carrying an EMP bud. They’re expensive, dubiously legal under droid rights laws, and if they’re small enough to conceal you have to be close for them to work. They also carry the risk of shorting out Zorii’s own helmet, communications and weapons.

She has less than a second to make the choice and it’s easy. She wrenches the EMP bud from a pocket even as the droid gathers itself to spring, arms it with clumsy fingers, and slaps it onto the droid’s underside. She hears it more than she feels it, and she feels it in the short shriek of her helmet’s ruined electronics, and the crunch of the assassin droid falling and landing directly on her head. That must be the faceplate going. But shatterproof means something these days, apparently, because it doesn’t fall into Zorii’s unprotected face.

“Zorii!” Rose yells, much closer to than she was before, and then “No, don’t take off her helmet, don’t touch her gloves - no bare skin - if you overwhelm her psychometry she’ll pass out. Zorii, wake up!”

The words come from right over her head, and Zorii feels a great weight move as the assassin droid is heaved off her. Through the sparkling and shattering material of her faceplate she can dimly see Rose’s face. She can dimly see at least two of her, but that’s either a concussion, shock, or blood loss.

Zorii tries to tell Rose that there’s no point in worrying about psychometry if you’re out cold, but her tongue is thick and heavy in her mouth, and soon enough it’s all gone black.

Zorii comes round in a bacta tank, freaks the fuck out, and tries to hammer her way out of the glass, which causes them to sedate her again. As a consequence, she wakes up some time later in a hospital bed. Everything smells violently of pineapple, but her skin doesn’t have the greasy feel of bacta and she isn’t wearing the stupid underwear or catheter, so someone must have hosed her down and redressed her in the hospital gown she’s currently wearing.

Kin is sitting beside her bed, looking annoyed, and annotating something. She hopes it’s not one of the reports she wrote.

“Oh,” Kin says, after several moments. “You’re awake. Good.” He frowns down at her. “Bliss, I didn’t think it would be necessary to tell you not to fall in love with Tico. What is this, a fucking holodrama?”

Zorii licks her lips and swallows until she’s got enough moisture in her mouth to croak out the words “Tough shit, sir.”

“I’ll take it you’re still high,” Kin says peevishly. He pulls on a pair of new surgical gloves from the bedside table, and holds a disposable cup of water to her lips. She sucks greedily at the fluid; it tastes like sweet relief.

Kin puts the cup back on the table. “Intelligence will replace your helmet,” he says. “The droid all but crushed it. Lucky you wear the wretched thing or you wouldn’t have a skull.”

Zorii blinks. Her eyelids are dull and heavy. “Lucky me,” she says, and falls back to sleep.

She wakes up again in fits and starts; memories come back to her too, slowly - Rose screaming, the click of the EMP bud making contact, Kin saying _I didn't think it would be necessary to tell you not to fall in love with Tico_ ; a thousand other things she can't quite piece together yet - and she finds she can watch the holonet. She rapidly wishes she couldn't. Security footage of her falling with a blaster bolt in her shoulder, of the droid crushing her helmet, is everywhere. Fortunately, it cuts out before it reveals her face, and fortunately there is no audio of Rose screaming her name. Zorii doesn’t like notoriety. It would make her job impossible, and this is what she does; what she's good at. Stuck in bed her mind goes round and round worrying about this; she plays game after game of Squares to shut it up, but at least at first she's too tired to maintain focus, and she tanks her score.

Rose has given a number of barnstorming speeches in the Senate, Finn sitting discreetly in the back of her pod and looking like the next person who twitches is dead; instead of convalescent flowers she sends Zorii a screener of Endor, an as-yet unreleased movie-length sequel to Echo, that she got sent because she mentioned Echo in an interview. The Senate session itself has been put into a two-month recess due to all the assassination attempts, and the Chancellor is trying to put together an independent enquiry despite the hysterics. The head of the Miners' Collective has been arrested and the Banking Union is under investigation for the role they played in financing the assassination attempts. It turns out they specifically had a problem with her trade and tariffs work, and that’s why they tried so hard to keep her from taking her seat once she’d made it onto the committee. Zorii smiles. You can’t legislate for stupid.

Jannah Calrissian and Zorii’s old squad send a virtual card that says GET WELL SOON, MORON, AND DON’T LET ANY MORE DROIDS SIT ON YOUR FACE in giant sparkly blue holographic letters. The Senate sends some kind of medal Zorii won't wear. Kaydel Ko Connix sends an elegant platter of snacks for people who can't move their torso more than six inches at a go, which taste better than hospital food. Zorii didn’t think Kaydel liked her that much, but she is very fond of Rose.

Zorii, meanwhile, has to deal with Kin wanting to know why she didn't ask to be reassigned, whether she has feelings for Senator Tico, and whether she's ever acted on those feelings. Zorii says nothing more than no or I don't know to everything, and kind of wishes she were back in bacta rather than having this conversation. Everything aches.

Eventually, Kin sits back, sighs, and says "I'm satisfied your feelings, whatever they may be, did not affect your professional conduct. All I can accuse you of is being an idiot, and you've suffered enough for that." He glares at Zorii. "I am putting you on injury leave."

Zorii doesn’t say anything.

"Dameron has invited you to stay with him. I know you're old friends."

Partners in crime, Zorii very nearly says, but Kin already knows all the jokes.

"So you'll be released from hospital on his recognisance, if you're willing to accept the invitation, and then I think there’s a flight to Ajan Kloss waiting for you."

Zorii panics, which is the only possible reason or excuse for the words "Sir, I'd like to volunteer for desk duty," which come flying out of her mouth. Poe’s legal residence is still Yavin IV for his father's sake - Zorii’s heard him mention it - but he spends much of his downtime on Ajan Kloss, where Rey and Finn set up the New Jedi Order. Apparently it used to be an ancient Jedi training site, and apparently it's where they feel closest to their mentor, Leia Organa. Who is definitely dead, but Zorii doesn’t propose to get into that.

And not that Zorii has been stalking Rose on the holonet or anything, but there’s plenty of public speculation that she and Finn are an item, they're sticking so close together. (The fact that Finn, Rey and Poe are married is irrelevant to some of the tabloids.) If Rose is anywhere, she'll be on Ajan Kloss, and Zorii will have to ask herself questions she’s scared of the answers to.

"No. Injury leave or hospital," Kin says.

Ajan Kloss is a large planet. Zorii will manage.

Zorii absolutely doesn’t manage. The flight out to Ajan Kloss is easy; she has a cabin next to Poe’s, and they spend a lot of time with their feet up, shooting the shit and talking about nothing. He’s always been good company. He was good company when he was the starry-eyed boy just figuring out that he couldn’t get his friend out of the mess he’d got into, the beloved kid Zorii had resented for having everything she didn’t and loved because he was too bright not to, and he was good company when he was the Resistance’s haunted leader hanging on by his fingernails, and he’s good company now, when they’re grownups with more grey hairs than they ever thought they’d get. He doesn’t talk about the assassination attempts except in strategic terms, and he doesn’t make Zorii talk about Rose.

He does confide in her that Rey is expecting a baby. Zorii yells and congratulates him and wishes they could get hammered on shitty cheap alcohol like they would have done, once. But now they’re in their forties and Zorii’s on the good painkillers and Poe is technically in command of this cruiser, to say nothing of the entire Republic Navy.

“I’m going to be the dodgy auntie,” Zorii informs him. “I’m going to teach your kid how to shoot and tell it all the dumb shit we got up to.”

Poe winces, but he grins. “I was sort of expecting that.” He hesitates. “You know Rose is visiting?”

“I guessed,” Zorii says. “But I don’t know how we got there from here.” She stares at Poe, who looks carefully blank. “Got a name for this kid yet?”

“Rey suggested Chewbacca,” Poe says. “But I think that was a joke. Finn wants Shara.”

Shara, Zorii remembers, is Poe’s dead mother’s name. “What do you want?”

“I want to call her Leia,” Poe says, too sincere, and Zorii knows that’s gone too close to the bone, so she teases the shit out of him instead of telling him he’s got too fucking big a heart for his own good.

She sleeps a lot, that’s the weird thing. On the way to Ajan Kloss she sleeps a lot, or limps around the ship. When they land she actually falls asleep between getting on the tender and hitting dirt. Rey’s technically hosting her in the caverns she has cleared out and turned into a home, and since Zorii doesn’t remember getting into bed in her guest bedroom - one of the ones with a view of the forest and easy access to ground level, thank fuck, Rey loves the deep caves but absolutely nobody else Human does - she thinks she might have been levitated in there. The doctors warned her about this - not the levitation, but the sleep. Her body needs time, they say, time, rest, sunshine, fresh air.

The doctors didn’t say anything about Rey’s special little ways of helping things along, but Zorii figures it’s no weirder than a bacta tank. And over the course of the next week or so, she does start to feel better.

Ajan Kloss isn’t new, but it feels that way. They’re fifty klicks from the original Resistance base, and Zorii doesn’t know it well. Her psychometry, too, is affected by her tiredness and the medication; when she was first injured she couldn’t block any impression that might come her way, and now she realises that even when she touches things with her bare hands she almost never gets a hint of anything at all. (Which is fortunate, given that Rey, Finn and Poe have probably fucked on most of the surfaces of Rey’s house.) She finds herself wearing gloves less and less, and feeling less and less self-conscious about her lack of a helmet. It hasn’t yet been replaced. That’s fine. Nobody knows who she is here, not really. Not as anything other than Poe’s friend, and, more irregularly, Rose’s friend.

Force-sensitive kids are stinking cute, whatever their species, and they think Zorii’s just great. They also think Rose is just great, because like kids everywhere, they have no filter. Zorii can’t honestly disagree; Rose is great. Rose is great, and Zorii misses her a lot. Rose is great, and Zorii misses her a lot, and Zorii’s sick of being such a coward she can’t look her in the face.

She turns to Finn and blurts it out, when he’s in the middle of explaining their plans to expand into a giant treehouse or something, Zorii did not catch the jargon. “Where’s Rose?”

“Avoiding you,” Finn says, switching gears with irritating seamlessness. “I told her not to, but she’s panicking that you felt forced into close quarters with her, and that you were only trying to protect her and she’s reading too much into your actions, and that you’re upset she accidentally told the world you have psychometry, and -” he waves one hand, dismissively - “an assload of nonsense.”

Zorii’s head actually swims. “Banthashit,” she says, distantly.

“Yep.” Finn squints at her. “Don’t faint.”

“Fuck off. Where is she?”

Finn tells her. Zorii can’t run yet, even though she’s successfully ditched the cane, but she can certainly limp at speed.

Rose is wearing a filthy pair of coveralls, hair tied up with a bit of electric wire, and whistling through her teeth while she maintains the boiler that’s currently the New Jedi Order’s main source of hot water. It might be the theme tune to Echo, Zorii realises as she stands helplessly a few metres away, Rose in her own little world. They lived in each other’s pockets for four months and now the only words they’ve exchanged for weeks are brief notes, less conversations and more memos, and Zorii looks at Rose’s dirty, scarred, capable hands and she aches.

She also clears her throat, and Rose jumps, drops a hydrospanner, and bangs her head on an open panel.

“I thought I taught you to have better situational awareness than that,” Zorii says, and then immediately curses every word out of her foolish mouth. But Rose doesn’t seem to care; she’s turning and smiling so brilliantly at Zorii that every beautiful outfit Zorii’s ever seen her wear is as nothing compared to a mucky old coverall.

“Zorii! I’m so glad you look so well.”

Zorii feels like a damp noodle and she’s covered in huge scars - neither raised nor insensitive, because they threw her into bacta so fast, but strangely pinkish pale against her brown skin. More to add to her collection. Maybe these will fade like the others. “Last time you saw me in person, I was bleeding all over your office floor,” she says, sitting down because she can’t stand up much longer.

A shadow crosses Rose’s face. “I visited you in hospital, but you were still under sedation. It was… strange.”

“Bacta’s always strange.”

Rose doesn’t argue. “It was so odd to see you… just floating.”

“I can swim,” Zorii says, but she knows what Rose means. Lifeless. “Yeah, I don’t like it either.”

“Beaumont told me they had to put you under just to get you out of the bacta.”

Zorii grimaces. “I don’t like it. Makes me panic.”

Rose makes a soft, sympathetic noise, and then there’s an awkward silence. They never used to have awkward silences.

“Did you like _Endor_?” Rose says eventually. “I thought it was pretty good. I thought they were all going to die for the sake of the plot, but -”

“If they do that the producers can’t make any more money off the series,” Zorii says, and Rose grins, pushing a loose strand of hair off her face.

“You’re such a cynic.”

“But you like me,” Zorii says without thinking, and then there’s a terrible stillness, and Rose’s eyes have gone wide as stars. Zorii swallows. Her chest aches and it’s probably not the ribs and lungs she just knit back together. “You do like me, Rose. Right?”

“I like you very much,” Rose whispers.

“Finn told me you were avoiding me in case I felt backed into a corner, or some ridiculous banthashit like that.”

Rose draws herself up and takes a deep breath, and suddenly Zorii can see Senator Tico in among the grease. “I don’t want you to feel that I put you at a disadvantage. You joined my security detail purely to protect me, and it would be unethical of me -”

“Rose,” Zorii interrupts. “I’m kind of tired and I need a hand up to get off the floor. If I asked you to come here and kiss me, would you?”

Rose stops, and the Senator Tico mask slips away. “Yes,” she says.

“I’m asking.”

When Rose’s lips touch hers, Zorii sees light gleaming off the planes of her surprised face, and the enigmatic surface of her helmet through the eyes of someone who sees every faint quirk of body language and catalogues those instead. When she cups the nape of Rose’s neck in her hand, she hears the wind on a temple on Yavin IV, and her own cool, sly voice _: nice view, senator. Look, don’t touch_. When Rose’s hands come up to cradle her face, and her dirty thumbs smooth over the tattoos on Zorii’s cheeks, she sees a lost-eyed senator in a filmy lilac gown over a purple jumpsuit, pressing a hand to the glass of a bacta tank and whispering _wake up, Zorii, open your eyes_.

Zorii opens her eyes to the sunshine, and Rose’s brightest smile.


End file.
